One Square Inch of Goodness – Build it!

If you ordered the Square Inch pre assembled, there are only 2 parts, the board and the strip of male header. That’s it! The rest of the work is done. You can solder headers on, or even sew the board into your project.

The best order I have found for assembly is soldering the Atmega328P first, then capacitors, then LED’s then resistors. You can check out some SMD soldering with this board or another tutorial I did. The LED’s have polarity markings on the bottom, a line with a little mark on one side of the line. The ‘mark’ on the line point to the cathode or negative side of the LED. Some LED’s have a ‘dark mark’ on the front of them, indicating negative, while others have a ‘light mark’. See the pictures below for reference.

The capacitors and resistors don’t have polarity, so it doesn’t matter what direction they are installed. The crystal is also set up where it can be installed in any direction aligning with the footprint. Take care to solder the ATmega328P so the dot on the IC lines up with the silkscreen dot on the PCB. The dot on the IC should be in the upper left hand corner if the board placed so you can read it normally. See the picture below for reference.

Have fun building this kit and please post any questions you might have in the forums.